Shenzi's Alcove

Christmas, birthday, hurrr!

So Christmas is in about two weeks now, and my birthday's in five days, so I've been busy making a list and getting everyone else's.

My list has ended up consisting of...

InFAMOUS 2
Some of the Cabela hunting games couldn't hurt, particularly the new ones
Skyrim for PC
Inheritance (latest Eragon book)
Gift cards (or general use visas) for Mulberry Farms, Home Depot, Best Buy, Petco, Petsmart
2.5” Sata 5400 RPM hard drive (storage size doesn't matter, just need a replacement for my PS3's ~70GB hard drive)
To add to the above, maybe data transfer/backup software
Long sleeve shirts (go with large or x-large sizes)
Flannel pants (again, go large or x-large, easier to make things smaller than bigger)


Honestly, this isn't very large or interesting list compared to what I normally have.

inFAMOUS 2 I got via Gamefly after playing the first (DL'd from PSN for the Welcome Back Program) and falling in love with the series. I've got a few qualms with both games, but meh. xD

I keep hearing good things about Skyrim, and everyone seems to be talking about it. It's also not a FPS, so I'll probably like it. I canNOT believe that CoD: MW3 ended up earning 1 billion USD[/url] already. Well, not already-- I can't believe it PERIOD.

For some damn reason, I picked up a Cabela's hunting game at some point and ended up liking them, so I kind of keep up with the franchise. Some of them are good, some of them so-so. They're hit or miss, but they're a nice little thing to keep up with. I haven't played any in a while since I got Gamefly and tried out some more mainstream games.

Inheritance is self explanatory, so I'll go on. Gift cards and general use Visas are just money on cards. Yay! Home Depot, Best Buy, and pet stores are self explanatory as well. Mulberry Farms is a website that sells live feeder insects for reptiles, and also some supplies. Since I keep geckos and plan on obtaining more, you see how useful this will be for me.

I got an 80GB model PS3, and after about four years now the hard drive is starting to get lower on capacity.

Clothes are clothes. I mainly threw them up there so I didn't get weird shit or food for gifts. The large to x-large size is because those'll be things I wear around the house and sleep in, and clothes are easier to fit in when they're too big, rather than too small.


Brother wants some games, Kim wants some kitchen items and gift cards to craft stores, mom wants an ice tea maker and pink things, and dad, I have no idea. Not sure about grandpa or Carolin either.




Besides that, I can also get myself any PC I like if I hit the right requirements. 1350 USD laptop, here I come!
But, no, really. I also pretty much NEED a new laptop, as the integrated graphics unit on this one is starting to die. I don't think I can fix that, either.

So, GED Test Scores...

Alright, 'bout time I finally put up a blog post on this.

There's not really too much to throw up(hurrr) onto this. On the last Monday and Tuesday of November, I took a GED test at a high school and ended up passing.

LA Writing- 520 | 58%
Social Studies- 580 | 79%
Science- 550 | 69%
LA Reading- 630 | 90%
Mathematics- 500 | 50%
Total- 2790; avg 556

The test is scored with points, rather than the percentage ranking. A score of 410 points is needed to pass each specific part of the test while having an average of 450.

All in all, not too bad. I haven't actually really done any schooling since eighth grade due to being sick. I'm stuck on a wall about this though. Either it means I'm pretty damn smart, or it means the education system in Nevada sucks. I think it's a mix of both, along with some luck.

The writing part of the Language Arts test had a prompt of "collecting things", and I ended up writing about collecting reptiles. I ended up rambling more than I would have liked, but it wasn't a particularly great subject anyway.

LA reading was pretty easy. Just correct a sentence's grammar and what not. They give you a short story or letter to read, but they copy the sentence to correct above the question, so what's the point?

Social Studies is as much of a crackpot as usual. It consists of reading text and inferring shit from it. No one thinks exactly the same, so there's no real way to do this correctly!

Science... this was another crackpot. It was all over the place with questions.

Math... okay, I hate math. I've never been all that great at it, but that has to do with teachers sucking at teaching it, or being unable to teach it in another way that you can understand. Just... argh! And in the end, who's really going to need to solve (9 x 210) + ((4 x 55) 99 / 5) in their normal life?


But, besides the test not being all that great IMO, I'm pretty happy with how this worked out. A few days after I got the test scores, my parents and I and my half brother and his wife all went out to dinner at Asian Garden. It says it's a Chinese resturaunt (Google Chrome considers that a misspelled word-- wtf?), but they actually serve all sorts of Asian foods, like the Japanese teriyaki sauce on chicken and broccoli, different kinds of fried/steamed rice, sweet and sour pork/chicken, a lot of different hot/spicy Vietnamese and Thai food. There's mainly Chinese dishes there for dinner, but their menu is huge! And I've never had anything I actually don't like. Lemon chicken, curry chicken, and some sort of deep fried eggs I've tried, and I don't care for them, but I don't dislike them.

Anyway, we had a pretty nice dinner. We got stuff via À la carte so we shared. We got chicken and beef with broccoli in a teriyaki sauce, shrimp with vegetables in a sweet sauce, chicken in sweet and sour sauce, chicken curry, some sort of deep fried egg thing, steamed white rice, and something else, I think. We shared a big bowl of some soup (egg flower/flour I think) before the dinner, and it was actually really good this time around. I usually don't care for it, but I had two cups of it. Kim, my brother's wife, is Chinese and actually brought up how a lot of Chinese/Asian resturaunts will thicken soup for Americans since the usual soup is more like water with food in it. Interesting, considering that the ever popular chicken soup and tomato soup are both rather watery.

Mitch (and Kim I guess) also gave me a general use Visa card with 75 bucks on it. Pretty nice little gift. Grandpa (on mom's side) and Carolin, his second wife (but third marriage, lmao), couldn't have dinner with us 'cause it was so late when we went, but they mailed me two cards, one for my birthday (this Saturday) and one for the GED test, both with a 50 dollar bill. Hurrr.

I've got some other things I wanna write about now, but I'll put it in another blog post.